8 Wednesday May 25 2022 | the timesarts CHRIS MCANDREW/JAMES GLOSSOP FOR THE TIMES; HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
to be installed, plumbed directly into
the Westminster sewers.” There
were no Portaloos in those days.
The choirboys had an
early start on Coronation day.
“At 4am the Archdeacon of
Maidstone came striding
through our dormitories
shouting, ‘Wake up, boys,
this is the day!’ ” Roocroft
recalls. “We left Addington
at 5.45am, and by 7.45am we
were lined up in the abbey
cloisters ready to process to
our seats high up near the
organ loft.”
From that vantage point the boys
could see an extraordinary crowd of
peers, politicians, monarchs and
princes from around the world
assemble. “The one person who really
stood out,” Roocroft says, “was the
Queen of Tonga, this big, jovial lady
in glorious flowing robes.” She was,
legend has it, the only dignitary who
braved the driving rain in an open
coach, determined to put on a show
for the soaked crowds.
Just before the main procession
started, a ripple of expectancy went
through the assembled throng andW
hat was it
like to be in
Westminster
Abbey on
June 2, 1953,
that cold,
rainswept
day when
Elizabeth II was crowned queen? With
one obvious exception, all those who
played a leading part in the ceremony
are now dead. However, among the
more than 450 musicians performing
at the service were 182 boy trebles (no
girls, of course, in those unenlightened
days). And although they are in their
eighties, two of those boys — James
Wilkinson, who went on to be the
BBC’s science correspondent, and
Stanley Roocroft, who is still
conducting choirs
in the north of
England — have
vivid memories
of the day.
Roocroft, then the
head chorister at
Blackburn Cathedral,
was one of 32 boys
from cathedrals and
parish churches
around the country
invited to join the
London choirs (from
Westminster Abbey,
St Paul’s Cathedral and
the various Chapels
Royal) for the service.
Developmentally, he only
just made it. “I was 14 and a half when
I got the invitation in March 1953,” he
says. “A month after the Coronation,
my voice broke. I went straight from
high treble to low bass.”
The assignment required him to
leave home for three weeks of
rehearsal, during which he would live
at Addington Palace outside Croydon
— once the grandiose summer
residence of various archbishops of
Canterbury, but by 1953 abandoned
and run-down. “I remember a warning
note being sent to my parents,”
Roocroft says. “It said, ‘The address,
Addington Palace, may conjure a
spectacle of splendour and luxury. It
would be unfair if we did not dispel
this misapprehension.’ They were
right to do so. It was pretty spartan.”
There was one compensation. Next
to Addington Palace was a golf club.
“We had been offered ten shillings to
cover our entire expenses,” Roocroft
recalls. “So some of us older boys
sneaked on to the golf course and
made a bit of money on the side by
caddying, until we were found out.”
Wilkinson’s experience of the
build-up to the Coronation was rather
different. He had been a member of
the Westminster Abbey choir since
1951, living in the choir school next
door. So he was able to watch in
amazement as, for five months prior
to the service, the abbey was
transformed with grandstands and
annexes so that 8,000 dignitaries
could be seated on the day. “They
even built railway tracks down the
aisle to transport all the steel and
wood they needed,” he says. “And of
course dozens of extra lavatories had
everyone rose to their feet. “It wasn’t
the Queen, though,” Roocroft
remembers. “It was a couple of
guys with carpet sweepers, doing
a last-minute clean. There was
a lot of laughter. I think we all
relaxed after that.”
Then the singing started:
a mighty fanfare from the
state trumpeters, and
straight into Hubert Parry’s
coronation anthem I Was
Glad. The man with overall
responsibility for the music —
William McKie, the Australian
organist of Westminster Abbey —
was perched on a high, narrow ledge,
conducting the vast forces without
a safety rail. “You can’t imagine it
happening today,” Wilkinson says.
This precarious position wouldn’t
have done anything to quell McKie’s
nerves. Even at the best of times he
was a volatile character. “Fearsome,
actually,” Wilkinson says. “He had a
terrible temper and often lost it with
the choir. Then he would be very
remorseful and take us all out to tea.”
The Coronation must have put him
under enormous pressure. “It did,”
Wilkinson says. “As the dayapproached he had to be wined and
dined by various colleagues and
friends who said, ‘Come on, you know
you can do this.’ ”
At the organ for the big day was
McKie’s deputy, and temperamentally
his complete opposite, Osborne
“Ossie” Peasgood, who had already
played for one coronation (George
VI’s, in 1937) and wasn’t going to let
performing live to 8,000 of the
world’s most important people faze
him. “He was a brilliant organist and
a delightful, relaxed character,”
Wilkinson says. “In fact, he was so
relaxed that he would often be playing
a piece while reading a copy of
Autocar magazine, propped on his
music stand. He loved cars.”
Presumably he wasn’t reading
Autocar during the Coronation.
“I don’t know,”
Wilkinson laughs.
“I couldn’t see from
where I was.”
As a newly
remastered Warner
Classics album of the
Coronation music
proves, McKie had
no need to worry.
The sound made by
those 450 musicians
— in music ranging
from ancient
favourites such as
Handel’s Zadok the
Priest to a new Te Deum by William
Walton — was incredible, although
Wilkinson remembers a couple of
dodgy moments. “At the start of Zadok
the violins’ arpeggios nearly got out
of sync,” he recalls. “And there was
another awkward moment just after
the crowning, when everyone was
instructed to shout ‘God save the
Queen’ repeatedly. I thought, ‘Oh
good, it’s going to be an outburst of
wild cheering, like at a football match.’
In fact, nobody quite knew when to
start, so it ended up as a rather
self-conscious murmur.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury was
reluctant to have TV cameras inside
the abbey at all. In the end the BBC
was allowed to broadcast live, but
using just five cameras and under the
strict injunction: “No close-ups” (an
instruction that Peter Dimmock, the
producer on the day, gleefully broke).
Those cameras transformed
everything. In Blackburn, Roocroft’s
parents bought a TV specially (many
people did), and all the neighbours
crowded round the “magnifier” placed
in front of the tiny screen to make the
images bigger. Wilkinson’s parents
watched too. “In fact, my father
phoned the BBC halfway through to
ask why there weren’t any pictures of
the choir,” Wilkinson says. “He was
told there weren’t any cameras
pointing at us.”
And after it was all over? Inevitably,
an anticlimax. “We went back to
Addington that night and the next
day we were put on trains back home,
back to reality,” Roocroft remembers.
“We went back to the choir school
and had tea,” Wilkinson says. “A boiled
egg. Mind you, that was quite a treat
in 1953.”The day we sang
for the Queen
As the Platinum Jubilee celebrations approach, two
former choirboys who performed at the Coronation
tell Richard Morrison about their memories
The Duke of Edinburgh
pays homage to the
newly crowned QueenWe were given
ten shillings to
cover our entire
expenses
The remastered recording The
Coronation of Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II is on Warner Classics.
A charity single featuring a new
version of God Save the Queen with
Alfie Boe and Sarah Brightman,
alongside the original version from
1953, is released on May 27tly into
re
ys.e boys
owd of
ndeveryone
the Que
remem
guys
a la
a l
rea
s
st
co
Gla
resp
Willia
organis
was perch
conductin
a safety raW “ w r C C p n Tth
—
fr
fa
H
PriesttoanewTJames Wilkinson, left, and Stanley Roocroft sang in Westminster Abbey at the Queen’s Coronation